Barthelme's Super Fun Field Trip to the Afterlife

“Then they said, but isn’t death, considered as a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of—“

The tone and curt language, the repeated use of ellipses and conjunctions, and narrative movement within Barthelme’s “The School” makes the piece unusual and highly poignant. The simplicity of the story lends well to its deep and philosophical undertone without robbing the reader of the wonderful “Aha” moment that comes with the realization that this piece is about more than children who kill things unintentionally. It’s a brief look at the relationship people have with death.

There could have been any setting with children, but Barthelme chose a school, a place for intellectualism and rationalization, not emotional excess or feel-good theories. He could have selected any narrator–a parent, a child–but he has the teacher relay the story, which is done in such a static, pragmatic, “this is how it is” way, it seems derived of any true sympathy. Even the line on the first page, “It was depressing,” is in reference to the children looking at the dead trees, not the death of the trees themselves.

The narrator in this piece is willing to rationalize and over-simplify the deaths as accidents, happenings due to human interference, instead of confronting them as inevitable. Harkening back to the borrowed passage at the top, most of the things that pass away are things a majority of people take for granted: animals, fish, plants, and even an impoverished orphan from a foreign country. By highlighting these within the text, Barthelme asks, not only his narrator but the reader, to consider the possibility that these are as equally important as the loss of human life. Yet, even in response to the deaths of family members and children alike, the narrator still offers a nonchalant, almost complacent explanation to these deaths as well. This move by Barthelme flushes out the idea that people not directly affected by death take an evasive, somewhat derisive stance on the notion. The borrowed passage shows this in the way the teacher interrupts the children. By not allowing them to continue, the teacher revokes the children’s right to see death as an affirmation of life. On the flipside, by refusing to let the children see (a presumable) he and Helen make love, the teacher also takes away their right to see life as an affirmation of death. Blinding the children to either thought helps bring about, in this author’s opinion, a brilliant end to the piece, with the new gerbil coming in, and the cycle of sweeping death under the rug forever doomed to repeat itself until the children die themselves.

At four pages, Barthelme does a marvelous job of keeping the prose light yet darkly humorous. An excellent story with an interesting message, “The School” is by far one of my favorites.